General
Which model to reach for when the job is not a specialised one. Four answers — best value for money, best there is, best with open weights, cheapest that still works.
Which model to reach for when the job is not a specialised one. 141 measured, 112 of them for sale, and 33 of those stand on two or more of these boards — only those can be picked.
- Best value for money · Best open sourceDeepSeek-V3DeepSeek · 2nd of 134 on Arc ai2 · 2 boards$0.2→$0.2per Mtok in / out13 sellers
- Best frontierLlama 3.1 405BMeta · 1st of 137 on Wino grande · 3 boards$1.2→$1.2per Mtok in / out3 sellers
- CheapestQwen2.5-Coder-7BAlibaba · 38th of 134 on Arc ai2 · 2 boards$0.025→$0.05per Mtok in / out3 sellers
Judged on
- LMArena · Search
- Simpleqa verified — Epoch AI
- Lech mazur writing — Epoch AI
- Wino grande — Epoch AI
- Piqa — Epoch AI
- Arc ai2 — Epoch AI
- Science qa — Epoch AI
- Lambada — Epoch AI
Capability is a model's mean percentile across the boards below, on each board's widest metric. Prices are quoted as you are billed them; where a model charges separately to read and to write, the two are ranked against each other at one part in to three parts out, which for this field puts the middle at $0.7 per million tokens. Best value for money is the most capable at or under that middle, and cheapest is the least expensive of those above the middle for capability — without that second floor the cheapest answer is reliably the worst model in the category. Figures read 2026-10-31.